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Shopping for Films but Settling for Some Fun

Fans greeting celebrities at the Sundance Film Festival.Credit
Ramin Rahimian for The New York Times

PARK CITY, Utah — A half foot of perfect, powdery snow fell here on Monday, carrying a message to the frantic crowd in temporary residence at the Sundance Film Festival: Slow down. Forget the branded parties on Main Street and the accompanying marketplace of film, and just enjoy the crunch of snow underfoot as you make your way to the next screening.

Sure. Beats worrying.

After a huge buildup about the commercial prospects of this year’s Sundance — where they said the writers’ strike and ambient private money could fuel a frenzy of acquisitions — buyers have their hands jammed deep into their coats, responding to both the cold snap and the fear that they will spend too much on movies that deliver too little.

Beyond the joy of a new snowfall, of course, there were some messages that this indie playground was welcoming more than movie stars and dollar signs. There were plenty of those, but there were also some movies with nobody special attached that rang out against the din.

On Sunday, for instance, there was a huge ovation for “Trouble the Water,” an intensely personal documentary about Hurricane Katrina that focused on the fight for survival traced by Kimberly Rivers Roberts and Scott Roberts, two New Orleaneans left behind by nature’s brutality and government indifference. They were both present for the screening, she remarkably pregnant and remarkably happy.

And at 6:15 a.m. on Monday, Martin Luther King Day here and everywhere, she gave birth to a baby girl named Skyy Kaylen Rivers Roberts, 7 pounds 1 ounce. Hope floats, in a hurricane, in a ruined city and, yes, at a film festival infested by wannabes and commercial interests.

If both buyers and sellers are a little bereft — there has not been a single significant purchase of feature film in the first five days of the festival — everyone else seemed more than happy to see little movies that may not end up being seen anywhere else. Documentaries, a huge commercial fiasco coming out of Sundance last year, continued to assert themselves artistically, with “Polanski” and “American Teen” kicking up chatter in the bars and coffee shops of Park City; the conversations had nothing to do with the films’ commercial prospects. And little movies like “Ballast” and “Momma’s Man” renewed the festival’s implicit promise of discovery but had no traction in the industry.

Main Street, of course, plays host to a few other activities besides movies. Every night there are frantic scrums in front of all manner of privatized nightlife options, with hierarchies of both need and power calculated by the minute. People in headsets examine hopefuls for credentials, wristbands, status or appearance, then decide whether they merit entrance to the warm and magical places within.

Which were plenty warm in the main, though rarely magical: rooms full of absently good-looking young people who seemed more interested in an incoming text than the people around them. Those who fought their way in soon found themselves fighting equally hard to get out.

Sundance always comes with a soundtrack. On Sunday night Patti Smith played (she is here behind a documentary about her career), and music filled the air deep into the night. When Lil John said, “Make some noise if you’re not from Park City,” the visiting hordes went nuts.

And at the Egyptian Theater “Adventures of Power,” a comedic film about air drumming — air guitar’s dumb brother — had its premiere at midnight. The film, which features Adrian Grenier, the crushed-on star of “Entourage,” was directed by and stars Ari Gold, an actor and longtime friend of Mr. Grenier’s who has the dubious honor of lending his name to the Jeremy Piven character on “Entourage.”

In true Sundance fashion, there was a preparty for the film, an intimate little dinner that was blown out to include hundreds, followed by the movie itself, and then an afterparty featuring a set by the Honey Brothers, a band that includes both Mr. Grenier and Mr. Gold. At 3:15 a.m. they were finally ready to play, but Mr. Grenier could not find — I am not making this up — his drumsticks. Some were finally obtained, and the show, as it always does at Sundance, went on.

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Just about everybody who comes to Sundance brings a little something besides a love of movies, and it is all on display in the ad hoc parade that is Main Street: the impossibly tall woman with the impossibly tiny little dog with booties on; the corpulent Ronald McDonald with a huge dollar sign of bling around his neck; the PETA protesters shouting slogans at a crowd whose members not infrequently wear fur. It can be a little bewildering.

“Do you have any idea what we are doing right now?” said Paul Giamatti as he walked down Main Street during his one day in town to promote “Pretty Bird,” a movie about the fight over custody of intellectual and physical property — a jet pack, to be specific. Mr. Giamatti carried a look of wonder and confusion as he was photographed in various media locations. Now sitting at a table outside the MySpace Celebrity Lounge with a bottle of MySpace Ketchup on the table, he was pretty obviously in the midst of a branding moment, as everyone was.

Cue Paris Hilton. She is a fully integrated media company now, with clothing, fragrances, guerrilla pornography and, this being Sundance, even a movie for sale: “The Hottie and the Nottie.” Everybody wants a piece of Ms. Hilton — the rock band the Bravery, MySpace, even Bon Appétit magazine — and she is now as much a part of the fabric of Sundance as obscure documentaries about people you had never heard of.

There has been no big bolt of theatrical lightning this year, no “Little Miss Sunshine” or “Once.” There are movies that will find both audience and distribution one way or another — “Sunshine Cleaning,” starring Amy Adams and Emily Blunt, seems perfectly confected — but others that rode in on a wave of hype have been just sitting there. After the premiere of “What Just Happened?,” directed by Barry Levinson and starring Bruce Willis and Robert De Niro, people said nice things. But the answer to the question posed by the film? Not so much.

Some of the attendees simply took Park City for what it is. Jason Reitman, the director of the runaway hit “Juno,” acquitted himself nicely in a charity hockey game on Sunday. Tom Bernard, the Sony Pictures Classics executive who might have been out frantically shopping, played as well.

“I would much rather be on the rink than fighting the line to get into a premiere at the library,” he said. “This is safer.”

And Emily Mortimer and Woody Harrelson, who are here in support of a Hitchcock-inspired train thriller called “Transsiberian,” looked up at the mountains of the village after a night of promoting the film and decided to strap on skis and snowboards on Sunday morning.

“There was this huge run-up with all of this talk, partly because there is so much new money producing films, but when you got here, there was really not much to buy,” said one film executive who did not want to be seen as soiling Sundance’s reputation for commercial and artistic excellence. “There are a lot of bad movies here, movies that should not have been made. And the few ones that could be turned into something in the market are going to have to head into the sweat lodge and wait it out. No one is throwing the kind of money around they were last year.”

It had been expected that the industry would bring a hunger to the festival this year, but instead the pall over Hollywood, cast by shuttered award shows and strike-stalled productions, seemed to come to the event. Civilians, though, have made their way amid the gloom with real enthusiasm.

Because, in the end, what do you mean there is nothing to buy? There are all manner of T-shirts, caps and pullovers on sale here to help document that you were at Sundance 2008, that you saw the thing, that you have pictures of the star. Look, there he is with his arm around me. He’s smiling. What could be better than that?

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page E1 of the New York edition with the headline: Shopping for Films but Settling for Some Fun. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe